Prologue 1 Dagan
The Fall of the Prime, Nightfall
The ground screams when gods bleed.
I hear it before I see it—the crack of bedrock beneath the battlefield, the shudder in the bones of Nightfall itself as if the realm draws breath to howl.
The sky over the Rooted Marches is a bruise, streaked with green lightning and SoulTaker fire.
Shadow armies swarm below, a hive of black armor and stolen light, their blades drinking the glow from the air.
And in the middle of it all, he stands.
The Prime.
Lord Aurel of the Crystal Caves.
My friend.
My king.
The only being who ever understood what it meant to have a realm wired into your veins.
“Dagan!” His voice booms through the storm, steady even as the wind tries to rip it apart. “Hold the line!”
I land beside him in a spray of broken stone, wings flaring wide.
Obsidian feathers catch the stormlight, throwing dark rainbows over the churned earth.
My claws sink into fractured rock and power answers me—a deep, resonant thrum that starts in the bedrock and floods my limbs.
“I am the line,” I growl.
He laughs once, short and harsh, eyes blazing with all the colors of Nightfall.
“Then don’t break, Dagan! By the gods, do not break!”
SoulTakers rush us.
They are not men.
Not really.
They wear the shapes of Nightfall’s fallen—twisted shadows of Demons and Dreamwrights—but their eyes are hollow pits, lit only by hunger.
They come for power, for the ore, for the dream forges, for the unmaking of everything that ever dared to hope.
I plant my feet and call the earth.
Stone spears rip from the ground, skewering the front ranks. Vines thicker than a man’s torso whip up from the cracked soil, thorns glistening with my blood and the realm’s magic.
They lash around SoulTaker limbs, dragging them screaming back into the dirt.
Beside me, the Prime is a storm given flesh.
His power is all four elements at once—fire in his hands, water at his command, air shuddering with every breath, earth bending to his will without argument.
When he moves, the battlefield moves with him.
When he strikes, reality rings like a bell.
Alaric, Kael, and Thorne work around us, fighting beside us.
For a while, we hold.
We always do.
Until we don’t.
I feel the moment it changes.
The ground shakes under my boots—not the steady drumbeat of war, but something ragged. Wrong.
A tear opens in the sky above the far ridge. Black, slick, gleaming, like a wound in the firmament itself.
SoulTakers pour from it in numbers that make my stomach clench.
And from the center of that rip steps a figure draped in shadow and bone, carrying no weapon but a staff and a smile that curdles the air.
I do not know this figure.
He looks sick with madness. Dark cloaks billow around him. His eyes are voids. His mouth twisted in a sneer.
Now the magic that coils around him is not Nightfall’s—it is something twisted, cannibalized, devouring itself as it feeds.
“Stop!” I snarl.
He doesn’t look at me.
He looks at the Prime.
“It’s time, old man,” the stranger calls, his voice echoing in ways sound should not be able to. “Step down.”
The Prime lifts his chin. “You first.”
They clash.
Not with swords, not with claws—but with power.
The air splits around them. Storm, flame, ocean, stone—it all roars, all shatters, all bends under the strain of two titans tearing at the same fabric.
I dive into the fray, wings snapping, claws slicing through SoulTaker ranks as I fight my way toward them.
Every step feels heavier. Every breath tastes of iron and ash.
The earth is afraid.
I have never felt that before.
“Prime!” I roar as a bolt of black lightning slams into his chest, driving him to one knee.
He snarls and shoves back, and for a heartbeat he is everything he’s always been—unyielding, incandescent, inevitable.
Then the cloaked man’s staff finds its mark.
It drives through air and ward and armor.
Buries itself in the Prime’s chest.
The sound that leaves him is not a cry.
It’s a crack.
Like a mountain finally giving way.
Time fractures.
The SoulTakers surge, howling in triumph. The sky flares sickly green. I throw out my hands and seize the ground itself, forcing it upward in jagged walls to buy us seconds, only seconds—I reach him as he falls.
Blood—bright, impossible, shimmering with starlight—streaks his armor. His hand clamps around my wrist, fingers digging into stone-hard flesh.
“Dagan,” he rasps.
“Do not speak,” I snarl, already pouring earth-power into him, trying to knit bone, to seal the wound, to anchor his soul in place. “You are not permitted to die. I forbid it.”
He smiles.
“Bossy as ever.”
His power flares, wild and uncontrolled, lashing out in all directions. I feel it burning through my arms, searing lines of force into my bones.
For a moment, everything in Nightfall sees through him—the very core of our planet is glowing like a heartbeat below, the Tidal Lands surging, the Broken Plains blazing, the Rooted Marches shuddering under the weight of what’s coming.
“I should have chosen sooner,” he murmurs. “Should have named a successor to be Prime.”
“You are the Prime,” I growl. “You will hold.”
His gaze locks onto mine.
“Aurel, do not die!”
“You will keep Nightfall safe, yes? You and the four.”
My jaw clenches. “We can’t do this without you.”
“You must. Listen,” he whispers, and his grip tightens. “The crown was never meant to rest on one head without help. It is too much. Too tempting. Too easy to twist.”
“You can’t go.”
“It is done, old friend.”
“Then, you must name one of us,” I snap. “Alaric. Kael. Thorne. Me. Any of us. But do not leave Nightfall without a Prime!”
His eyes go distant then, beyond me, beyond the battlefield.
“Not one,” he breathes. “Four.”
I do not understand.
I do not have the luxury.
His power surges one last time—rushing into me, burning down my spine, branding itself into the bedrock of the Rooted Marches.
I feel him leave, like a star going out, like a pillar torn from the heart of the world.
“No,” I snarl, shaking him. “NO!”
But the Prime is already gone.
The crown—his crown—falls from his brow, shattering the earth where it lands before vanishing in a flare of wild magic.
And Nightfall screams.
The SoulTakers are driven back that day—Alaric’s fury in the skies, Kael’s wrath in the tides, Thorne’s inferno on the Plains, my rage in the earth—but it doesn’t matter.
Because the balance is broken.
The Prime is dead.
And something inside me cracks with him.
I bury my grief where I bury everything else.
Deep.
Stone-hard.
Unyielding.
I will not break.
I will not trust like that again.
Not ever.